This might already be stated everywhere else on the internet but nothing is clear...

Any Intel or AMD CPU based platform. New motherboards(UEFI) are not supported properly with FreeNAS and FreeBSD in general.Server components like RAID controllers and ethernet cards are extensively supported but by all means CONFIRM first before any purchase.

Recommended components: All intel and amd cpu's. Anything more than 2 cores is overkill. Remember the whole purpose of NASis low power consumption, with hard disk-drives, RAID cards and add on NIC cards utilizing the maximum power. The system serves no other purposeother than High network I/O with RAID assist. Dont expect it to play HD videos but instead it'll stream to a device that can.

IF ZFS is used, RAM comes into play. 16GB is sufficient to last a very long time. There are cheap ddr3/ddr2 solutions from AMDand plenty to choose from in the second-hand market.

Maximum cost of the system is geared towards hard-disks and NIC cards/equipment, with RAID controller optional and finally RAM.In no way does a costly CPU justify a dedicated NAS box.

NOTE: In a dedicated NAS system, graphics cards are the ONLY and absolute useless components. ALthough FreeBSD supports NVidia cards fully and AMD being the exception, FreeNAS does not support any graphics capability.

On the other hand, linux runs ADT(any damn thing) bought of the shelf. But better check to be safe than sorry.

I would like to ask a question, I am running FreeNAS-9.3-STABLE-201604041648 using Intel(R) Core i5-2500 CPU @ 3.30GHz with 16GB of RAM. I currently have CIFS services running, for my Windows shares. I have been able to read, write and execute files from my windows machines with no problems. But from my linux box (UE3.4), I can only read and execute files. In other words, I can not move files to the server from Ultimate Edition 3.4, but it can read them just fine. I would like to be able to get Ultimate Edition 3.4 to have full permissions but I haven`t been able to figure out how to do this. Do I need to set up a separate dataset just for Linux? I only have one group and user set up in the system using CIFS .